Good post, Erica. You have provided a good list on how to make money online – scam free. I would go for ‘Help local businesses develop an online presence’ and ‘Interview other people and sell the interviews’ as these options would help me to interact with other businesses as well as other businessmen. This is a good way to network yourself and make your own circle of friends which may lead to something better.
Getting businesses to advertise on your podcast, either at the beginning or end or both is a great way to create a revenue through podcasts. Most businesses won’t be keen to advertise on your podcast until you can prove a large number of listeners. Therefore, it is unlikely you will be able to start out from the get-go with sponsors. But once you accumulate regular listeners or a high number of downloads from iTunes, you can start to sell advertising space on your podcasts.
I myself was a pretty big Magic: The Gathering fanatic from 18 – 21 years of age. Though I didn’t setup any website about it, I did cojoin a site related to Dungeons and Dragons content and provided GM tools written in excel for download. At the time I never had much interest in branching out and starting my own sites for profit and 10 years later I started up my blogs. Had I only started ten years earlier I would be in a vastly different place than I am now, but as they say hindsight is 20/20

I love referral and affiliate marketing. It’s where the vast majority of my income comes from these days. Even if you aren’t a blogger, you can get in on the action as well. You can get paid to refer your friends to a wide variety of legitimate services. While there are many companies like StitchFix that will give you store credit for referrals, we are focusing on those that offer cold, hard cash today. Keep in mind, you will need to be signed up for the program yourself to take advantage of the program. But, you shouldn’t be referring people to things you don’t use anyway.

I look for income streams that do not require significant amounts of work to maintain. If I need to drastically increase the amount of product I sell or customers I attract to make good money, and that requires more of my own time to achieve, or cannot be easily outsourced to others (it often increases your labor just to organize outsourcers, so don’t assume outsourcing is a magic solution), that’s not the method for me.
Good post, Erica. You have provided a good list on how to make money online – scam free. I would go for ‘Help local businesses develop an online presence’ and ‘Interview other people and sell the interviews’ as these options would help me to interact with other businesses as well as other businessmen. This is a good way to network yourself and make your own circle of friends which may lead to something better.
Build your audience on a course community: If you’re just getting started building an audience for yourself and want to leverage communities already actively looking for content you can choose to host and sell your online course on a site like Skillshare or Udemy. These are easy, cost-effective ways to build an audience and test your niche to see if there’s demand for it.

Online savings accounts usually come with crazy good interest rates to help you grow your money faster (regular in-person banks can’t offer rates as high). We’re fans of CIT Bank and Discover Bank (among others) because their interest rates are often over 25 times the national average. That means the money in your savings account will grow 25 times faster than the pace it’s most likely growing at now. Really, though, you can’t go wrong with pretty much any online savings account that offers over 1.50% APY 🙂